This post includes an excerpt from chapter 5, which provides a thorough look at how to acknowledge, recognize, and respond to the fifth step in the journey through dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease when paranoia emerges.

This chapter shows why and how paranoia is part of the journey through dementias and Alzheimer’s disease, the impact it has on our loved ones, and how we as caregivers should respond to them both medically and personally with kindness, gentleness, and understanding.

This fifth step requires a lot of love, a lot of commitment, a lot of sheer determination, a lot of perseverance, and a lot of courage on our part as caregivers because this, of all the steps, can be most brutal emotionally to us personally because it will literally chew us up and spit us out on a continual basis all the way through it.

This chapter offers practical and accessible information to help us and our loved ones navigate this step successfully and intact.

“Pervasive paranoia is the next step in the journey of dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease. At some point, hallucinations and paranoia tend to overlap – the hallucinations, especially if they’re scary will elicit panic and anxiety – but paranoia eventually stands on its own as a distinct step in the journey.

Paranoia has a complicated root system that we’ll break down into its components so that we understand why it occurs and what it looks like.

One of the roots of paranoia in our loved ones with dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease is confusion and fear. There is self-awareness, at this point, within our loved ones that something is really wrong. They don’t know what it is, but the feedback around them, spoken and unspoken, tells them that they can’t trust themselves.

All of this also creates anger and fear because humans are wired to trust themselves – their reasoning, their assessments, their intuitions, their processing of the external world – more than to trust any other human being. When that innate ability is constantly challenged and proven faulty, it’s scary and it is infuriating.”